'PC gamers: hobbyists or heroes?' is not the title of a new report from data firm Newzoo on the Japanese gaming market in 2025, but it probably should be. Turns out, our humble platform has been singlehandedly keeping the rate of profit propped up in the country while consoles have lagged for a good while now. But darker times beckon: the experts predict it's set to slow down in the years to come.
In Japanese yen, 2024 was a year of eye-popping growth for the humble personal computer. It made up ¥240 billion of the overall gaming market's ¥2,483 billion value that year, a year-on-year increase of 16.2% on 2023. Which is nuts. That's a lot of growth.
To be fair, PC is by far the smallest of the three segments Newzoo divides its analysis into, and thus it's easier for it to make bigger relative shifts with comparatively smaller absolute numbers. The console market, meanwhile, was valued at ¥525 billion last year, a -3.1% drop on 2023 (which the experts attribute to "the Switch’s lifecycle and a weaker premium slate"), while the mobile market makes both PC and console look like tadpoles: it was worth ¥1,742 billion, a 5.2% increase on 2023.
So PC might be small in Japan (though hey, I think it's doing better than the benighted Xbox, which Newzoo puts at under a million units sold cumulatively—760,000—as of December last year), but its rate of growth puts everyone else to shame. That's even more the case when you translate the yen figures to US dollars.
The yen has been looking a tad sickly recently. Last year it fell to the weakest it's been against the US dollar since 1986, and this year hasn't been much better. In dollars, then, every sector of the Japanese gaming market actually shrunk last year. Consoles were down -10.1%, mobile -2.4%, and the overall market slumped -3.3%. Only PC marched on with a 7.8% year-on-year growth rate measured in US dollars. "PC gaming has been the main growth engine for the past seven years," reports Newzoo, in both yen and dollars.
No wonder the last five or ten years have been such a feast when it comes to Japanese games finally paying attention to PC, but don't hoist the victory flag high just yet. Despite the impressive numbers, the forecast is that PC is set to climb down from the sky-high rates of growth it's enjoyed in Japan for the last near-decade.
Specifically, Newzoo forecasts that PC is about to be eclipsed by consoles for the first time in a long time in Japan. In yen, the period 2018-2021 saw PC revenue growth leap up 12%, from ¥95 billion to ¥135 billion. 2021 to 2024 was even wilder: a 21.4% growth from ¥134 billion to ¥240 billion. Console revenue, meanwhile, only grew by 5.3% and 1.7% in the same timeframes (in USD, console revenue shrank a wince-inducing -8.7% between 2021 and 2024).
And yet, Newzoo reckons that PC revenue will jump by a mere 5.1% (in yen and USD) between 2024 and 2027, while consoles will enjoy a 6.3% climb.
I think it's clear what's happening here, and it's called the Switch 2. For years, PC in Japan has enjoyed filling the vacuum caused by Nintendo stubbornly refusing to update its flagship product. But now it's here and Japanese consumers are taking to it like nothing else.
So I guess the good news is, hey, maybe in a few years Nintendo will forget to release a console again for a while, and PC can once again enjoy the warm sunlight of popularity in traditionally console-centric Japan. Hey, at least we're not Xbox.
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